


The fire and fume

by Himboskywalker



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Bottom Anakin Skywalker, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Mutual Pining, Past CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Pining, Top Obi-Wan Kenobi, like seriously so much pining, the inherent homoeroticism of medieval knighthood
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-20 17:01:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30008097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Himboskywalker/pseuds/Himboskywalker
Summary: Years of battle have separated Obi-Wan and Anakin on opposite ends of the Republic with no end in sight to war with the Separatists. But Anakin has called the Council for desperate aid to battle a sith dragon, and there is only one surviving knight within the Jedi Order who has slayed a dragon."Lend me your light and your sword, master, one last time.”
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 13
Kudos: 120





	The fire and fume

**Author's Note:**

> Another au instead of updating my other wips???Couldn't be me.
> 
> We are on a RotS timeframe so Anakin is 23 here.

**The fire and fume**

**over fearless head**

**rushed by roaring;**

**rocks were groaning.**

**The black belly**

**bent and coiling,**

**over hidden hollow**

**hung and glided.**

**\--“Regin,” _The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún_**

* * *

* * *

Heat clung to his skin like sun to stone, though sweat did not cling to him as it did at home. The air was dry here, so dry that if he left his wineskin’s cork plugged too loosely the liquid escaped like a mirage. Even through his linen headscarf, and his helmet when he could bear to be cooked alive in it, his porcelain fair skin burned and blistered as pork over hot coals.

The aromatic singe of spices followed him through the crowded market, and the sweet scent of sand heated caf and shank grilled meats. He ached, months long travel fatigued by sea and camel, and with a hollow stomach from running through the last of their provisions just outside Mos Espa. Mos Eisley, a mere outpost made up of a Republic garrison and a market for the goat herders and nomadic traders to exchange goods, had been a day’s ride from the capital, with only enough flat beer to keep his mouth from cracking in the heat.

“Excuse me,” he muttered to a man selling thick rind cheeses and olives from the coast under a low hanging shade cloth. “I’m looking for a Jedi Knight.”

The man shook his head. “Jee hagwa stuka, outmian.”

“Jedai,” he tried again, “ _Je’daii_.”

“Ahh,” he pointed to the dark entrance of a sandmud building buffeting the market against the worst of the desert wind. “Je’daii la, noleeya bu yocola poonoo.”

“Thank you.”

The man waved him off and he kicked sand from his boots before stooping through the door and squinting against the dimness and heady scents of wine and incense inside the cool, dark space.

“Force—Master!”

He blinked against the darkness and then saw a figure once terribly familiar, though which now looked far taller and broader, a boy grown into a man.

“Anakin,” he laughed as they clasped each other’s arms over the layers of roughly woven tunic sleeves and the leather of their buckled bracers to collide in a grating hug. Their chainmail clinked with the movement, metal catching against metal. “By the stars is it good to see you.”

He clasped the back of Anakin’s head and knocked their foreheads together. After a moment Anakin drew back a little, his own gloved hands still clutching at Obi-Wan’s shoulders and kissed his forehead just as they said goodbye so terribly long ago. In the force he felt Anakin’s starlight, brilliant and warm as flame. Something in the chambers of his heart lurched terribly, the absence of his padawan’s warmth for so long only aching the more now that he felt it again.

Memories of his former padawan were fond and coveted things, pretty little songbirds kept safe and treasured in filigree cages. They were simpler times, before the war, days spent training and learning at the Jedi temple in Coruscant. But all padawans became men and left their masters, just some younger than others. Anakin had been—achingly young, still a boy really. But war made men or corpses of boys.

“Oh,” he said after they parted from their embrace, fingers sliding away from mail and shoulders. He looked on the pink, jagged scar lacing through Anakin’s brow and skating his eye. “It has been so long, hasn’t it?”

“Eight years or a lifetime,” Anakin said around a sad smile, flashing a mouth full of straight, white teeth. “I’m sure you’re starving, here—I have food and tea for you.”

They unbuckled their swords and folded themselves around a small table on the straw covered floor, boots and knees crammed against one another; but Anakin seemed easy enough with the quiet familiarity as Obi-Wan licked butter soft goat cheese and sticky dates from his fingers. The steaming tea pressed to him in a blue painted earthen bowl, tasted of green mint and honey.

“Am I stealing your meal?” He murmured over the humid warmth of the drink in his hands.

“No,” Anakin tapped two fingers against his breastbone, over the worn fall of his surcoat and the faded symbol of the Jedi they wore. “I felt you in here.”

“Really?” He asked around the unleavened bread in his mouth. “From how far?”

Anakin propped his chin in his gloved hand and watched him with a curious smile. “I felt when you docked from the sea in Tatooine, but very faintly. I felt your warmth in the force when you reached Mos Espa though, had a feeling I would find you here.”

Pride blossomed golden and hearty as summer fruit in his sternum, though he could practically hear old Master Yoda chiding him for the sentiment. “You’ve grown much stronger.”

“The choice out here is strength or death.”

He frowned as he tore unleavened bread to divide between them. “I’ve read the missives of the war here in the outer territories, but how bad is it really?”

Anakin took Obi-Wan’s offering with gloved fingers. “Long, bloody, I lose men like livestock being slaughtered. When the Jedi brought me in, I never imagined we’d be used as hired thugs for the Republic.”

“Is that what you think we are?”

Anakin shrugged and averted his eyes, an old habit he remembered well. “It’s different in the outer territories, Obi-Wan, we aren’t wanted here. The Jedi are peacekeepers and scholars in the core territories, heroes in Coruscant, but these people see us as hired swords by invaders.”

“We are not beholden to the Republic.”

“No, but they know our temple is in Coruscant. To these people I am just another Republic soldier from the core territories, the capital city even. The Separatist soldiers don’t help matters; they love nothing more than to trade Jedi rumors like goods at market.”

He rested the warmth of the tea bowl cupped in his hands against the burn of his sun cracked lips and ignored the ache of his sore hips, pushing away his fatigue and marrow deep weariness.

“It serves them very well to sow mistrust and build their own in turn. What types of rumors?”

Anakin stretched the broad expanse of his shoulders under the weight of his chainmail and pulled a snarl of sweat tangled curls from under the buckles of his shoulder pauldrons. He was heavily armored to be travelling through a sand swept outpost such as Mos Eisley made up of a market and alehouse. It was heavy armor for a skirmish even, more battle wear against cavalry or pikemen.

“Separatist companies love nothing more than to garrison outside of nomadic trade markets like this and drink with the local tribes. They tell them the Republic pays sell swords that kidnap children for their soldiers. They say we indoctrinate them to forsake emotions and to worship an all seeing and cold god.”

He grimaced wryly and felt the split fissures in his mouth pull from the reflexive expression. “Nothing we haven’t heard from the streets of Coruscant, those who do not feel the force cannot understand—”

Anakin ducked to whisper over his meal, leaning so closely that his pauldron pressed against Obi-Wan’s own chainmail and his gloved fingers brushed against his own knuckles. There was no great need for it, the dark space of the alehouse was empty save for them, its owner most probably brewing fresh drink from the thick smell of spiced malt and yeast in the air.

“The Separatists are not why I asked the Council for another knight’s aid, master.”

He paused, sensing Anakin’s crackling unease in the force that tasted like vinegar on the back of his teeth. But still they sat alone in the cool darkness of the beer house, left to themselves in the straw and quiet save the whistling wind outside the low and deep-set stone doorway.

“Master Windu specified urgency,” he said calmly, refraining from leaning into the press of his pauldron and falling to an easy familiarity long unkindled and terribly difficult to break. “What could be dire enough for the infamous Jedi knight Anakin Skywalker to ask the Council for help?”

Anakin’s full mouth twisted and though it had been many years, it was an aggrieved expression he knew well. It looked less petulant now, his full mouth no longer rounded by youth but broadened into something that wavered between alluringly feminine against such a masculine physique. 

“A company of my men pursued Separatist forces far north to capture a spy but when they attacked, they were faced with a Sith dragon.”

He froze with his fingers curled around the tender skin of a sticky and wrinkled date. “This was absolutely confirmed?”

“My Captain saw it himself, black with blue fire.”

“Blue flames?” He leaned back and closed his eyes on a deep sigh. He still remembered the way ruby scales and black horns glinted oil slick and bright from the light of Maul’s flame. He remembered even better the gagging stench of sulfur, of charred human flesh and fat melted like tallow to the bone.

Anakin rapped his knuckles against the table with a hardened, steel lined expression that did not look so familiar to him. “My men engaged with it south of the Endor forests, but it fled even further north, I fear—”

“It fled to the Dirahn Mountains.”

Anakin bowed his head solemnly for a moment, face drawn. He expected questioning, attitude—Anakin’s constant drive to fight and push against his authority as a child and young man that he grew accustomed to. But eight years of warfare in the desert had taken his petulant bite and traded its place with long suffering acceptance—

“I am sorry I asked for you, master. I would never have wished this on you again, but you are the only living Jedi who has taken down a dragon.” He paused and then rapped his knuckles again, his eyes darkening. “I need your experience. Lend me your light and your sword, master, one last time.”

No, it wasn’t acceptance. Behind the blue of his boyish eyes still licked those hungry and violent flames. It was grim determination and eight years of blood Anakin wore, long sufferingly for the light of his soul had not escaped butchery unscathed. It seemed dimmed to Obi-Wan, a candle burned too long through the night.

“And of course you have it.”

Anakin’s shoulders eased and he settled back on his hips, as if he had genuinely feared Obi-Wan’s refusal. To what end? It went against everything they believed as Jedi, to let the fears of his past bar him from his duty, from aiding not just the people of the Republic, but a man he had known and loved dearly and tenderly for years.

“My men are ready to ride north as we speak then.”

“No further north than Endor.”

Anakin’s mouth twisted in a bemused frown. “Even we can’t face a Sith dragon alone. It nearly took out an entire battalion of my men.”

“A dragon will sense a legion of soldiers for leagues upon leagues, stealth will be our only option.”

Anakin rolled his shoulders with the cool, tinkling sound of his chainmail rustling and a smirk playing at his soft mouth. “I never was very good at stealth.”

“Well you have had eight years to learn.”

Anakin merely laughed and unfolded himself from the straw. They buckled their swords around their hips as they stepped into the brilliant sun. In the full light he finally looked on his old padawan, who seemed to have grown well into a man. It struck Obi-Wan oddly, following his shallow boot prints in the sand, the difference eight years had made.

Anakin towered through the market, tall and chin raised with well oiled and cared for armor that gleamed blindingly set against the bright sand. His blued steel pauldrons cast him broad shouldered and though his surcoat looked sun bleached and worn and his leathers muddied and caked, he looked every line of every Jedi ballad sung in taverns and mead halls.

He ached with a wrongfooted and remis sort of pining, weary from the sudden weight of the years. The war separated many of the Jedi for such a time, some permanently that he would never see again in this life. And while he loved all his comrades, bound by battle and blood and the force, Anakin he raised.

Anakin he taught how to hold the hilt of a blade, to hold a quill, to wrap his busted hands from falling on cobblestones during duels and soothe healing salves into his wounds. Anakin who grumbled from Obi-Wan burning candles to their quick late in the night while reading texts but who refused to bunk away from him. Anakin who always caught underfoot, in the baths, the kitchens, the bailey, until war called and Obi-Wan kissed his forehead goodbye.

Separatist forces in the north called Obi-Wan away not long after. Nearly as many years passed since even he saw the battlements of the Jedi temple in Coruscant. Letters came from Quinlan, Aayla, and Shaak Ti, from farther east than Tatooine, from the unlucky legions posted to the outer regions beyond the reaches of the Republic even further north than his own legion.

Letters from Anakin, who mattered most, came far less often than the others. The 501st were known to see the worst of the Republic’s conflicts, known to always be on the move in the outreaches of Tatooine where letters and supplies and men were difficult to reach. Often a year passed before Master Windu sent him pitying word, brief missives because he knew above all Obi-Wan worried. But Mace did what he could for him, he knew the heartache of sending a padawan to war. Often the letters contained only a line or so, when the council knew just as little on the fate of the famed 501st.

_Skywalker is alive._

Words he wept over while snow gales and wind howled outside his tent. His hands always shook while he broke the Order’s wax seal, and away from the weighing eyes of his soldiers he cried over every single letter.

His men were good—strong, honorable, exemplary soldiers. But even good soldiers did not shine with starlight in the force.

* * *

Outside the huddling structures of Mos Eisley they found Anakin’s troops catching rest in the shade of their horses and watering their mounts at the last well for leagues.

“Rex,” Anakin said as he packed fresh bags on his horse handed to him by the captain. “How did the search for provisions go?”

The captain, amber skinned and dressed down in pale linens and a blue blazon on his shoulder, frowned against the high sun. He looked startingly familiar, in the shape of his eyes and the bridge of his nose, a pantomime of his own commander left in the far north with their troops.

“We’ve enough dried meat and grains to last a fortnight, less beer, even less wine. Forsaken outpost had even less to barter than Mos Espa, enough cheese for a day or so.”

Anakin grunted and tightened the billet strap of his saddle before patting the rouncey’s bay rump. “It’ll fair well enough. General Kenobi and I will ride with you and the men until the port, we’ll part ways there. I want you to take the men west to Ryloth, General Secura has requested for reinforcements there.”

The captain scowled. “General—”

Anakin clapped him on the shoulder with an incredibly fond expression. “It’s an order, captain. General Kenobi and I will be going to Dirahn alone.”

The captain’s frown deepened as he stooped to shoulder his own pack bags without further comment, though he did mutter mutinously as he pushed past, “someone get him a keffiyeh before his skin catches fire.”

Anakin pulled a heavy head scarf from a satchel and tossed it to him with a quirk to his lips. “The wool is hot, but it will hold better against the sun.”

Anakin’s own skin looked honey golden and bronzed from years under the desert sky even as he wrapped a dark headscarf around his head and throat, covering the tangle of his heat lightened curls. “It’s exhausting, but this stretch of desert is overrun with Separatists and we travel armored, at least during the day.”

He wondered how Anakin kept his mail from rusting with the salt of his skin and sweat, even more how he kept from heatstroke in the metal when water rations were always bare in arid lands. Plate and chain stood difficult enough to keep oiled and without rust for battle, let alone worn for weeks of travel in the sand.

“Have you endured that many surprise attacks?”

Anakin unthreaded a small leather pouch, jerked his leather glove from his left hand with his teeth, and dipped his fingers in saved chunks of kohl to smudge it around his eyes through tearful blinks.

“Often enough,” he said. “It’s not quite as bad as it used to be. Years ago the forces here worked with a darksider, a night sister from the far south. With her sorcery they tracked us by night, liked to ambush with no moon when you could barely see your hand in front of your face out in the desert. We slept in our boots and our armor for months on end, I thought it would never end.”

“I never received word you and your men dealt with a sorceress.”

“It was years ago,” Anakin said dismissively, stroking his horse’s neck as he tucked his kohl pouch inside of a bag. “She carved open my face and I killed her and now I can sleep without chainmail on.”

Obi-Wan paused, merely a hesitation between breaths as he watched a man he once knew better than himself. There was that hardness again, that darkened and dogged look in his eyes. His own commander, at night when they crawled in the same bedroll to offer warmth and companionship, told him he worried, when he smiled less and less with every battle and every day he scrubbed copper flakes from under his nails. He tried not to let the violence harden him, but some things—some things were impossible even with the force.

Anakin caught his expression and his mouth softened even as he averted his eyes, skittish to be caught. “She deserved it, don’t look at me like that.”

“I am not sure the deserving of life or death is our decision.”

“Is it not?” Anakin said tiredly. “Then what have I been doing in this fucking desert for eight years?”

It occurred to him as he took the reins of his own fresh rouncey and the legion mounted under the high midday sun, that he no longer knew Anakin. His Padawan, with a freshly shorn braid and a polished sword, left the temple a boy. He looked on a Knight now, battle hardened and beaten from marble, cold even and steel forged. He thought himself, in the privacy of his own mind, foolish to have expected and pined to see such a boy again. In his broad-shouldered armor, headscarf and kohl, with his sword on his hip, Anakin looked nothing like a boy.

Hours later of hard riding, under the turning wheel of bright stars and in the warm glow of the low fire they finally unburdened the weight of their armor and wrapped the metal in their saddle blankets. Anakin rolled his wide shoulders and groaned, handing Obi-Wan his ration of porridge and smoke-dried bream.

“You’re much changed, master,” Anakin said in the silence of their meal. The quiet between them felt especially poignant with the laughter and jovial conversation of the soldiers surrounding them, the hundreds of men crouched or sprawled around their own low fires built from scrounged desert tinder.

In his own ways, Obi-Wan was also much a boy when they parted ways. Jedi knighthood prepared him for cultural negotiations, to act as ambassador and advisor, and while he knew the horror of his own master’s death, knew the fuming burn of dragon’s blood on his naked flesh; one act of dragon slaying felt little preparation for years of constant war.

“I’m sure I seem a weary old man to you,” he laughed, brushing his sorrows away to the forgiveness of the force. Anakin raises his eyebrows over the beer-flask raised to his lips. Against his better senses, Obi-Wan’s eyes caught on the working of his prominent throat as he swallowed.

Anakin wiped his reddened mouth with his still gloved hand and barked out a sharp laugh. “Do you still see me so boyish, master? That I would see a brother in arms as a weathered old relic?”

Boyish? Certainly not.

“That depends,” he answered lightly, “on if you would still sneak strawberry tarts until you’ve sicked all over my floor.”

Anakin blossomed shocked delight in the force and his golden face lit in a radiant and toothy grin. “I haven’t thought about the temple’s tarts in years. I can’t vow a thing, master, who knows my lack of self restraint when proffered with strawberries.”

He let himself feel sick with heartache in that moment, for the simplicity of the past, for the days of etching ink to parchment and stepping padawans through swordplay in the bailey. But he shook away the sentiment and roused the strength of his own mind. To yearn for the past only sowed his own grief, and with Anakin beaming across the fire, to long for another time dishonored the man of the present.

“You always did have a terrible sweet tooth,” he said fondly.

“You loved the strawberry tarts just as well,” Anakin accused through a mouthful of porridge.

After settling by the dim coals in their blankets and warmed by the heat of another force sensitive beside him, Obi-Wan slept deep and peaceful for the first time in many years.

* * *

The days bled one to another in a mirage of heat and wind and sand. The desert burned mercilessly in whirling gales so scorching the air felt like dried heat straight from a stone oven. Their linens and wool and armor did little to keep their sweat from wicking away as they rode across the sunbaked sand.

The horses could only be ridden as hard as their water rations allowed, divvied carefully between the wells Anakin kept marked on a velum map, noted from his legion’s many interactions with the nomadic tribes who somehow eked life from the golden and barren dunes. It amazed him, the bravery and goodness of the herders Anakin chirped in Huttese with. They offered information readily and freely with broad handed gestures while Anakin listened intently. These people knew him and regarded the Jedi knight highly. He needn’t feel the bronzed glow of their respect in the force to see it on their sun darkened faces.

Obi-Wan waited patiently in his saddle and watched a woman bent with age with silvered hair wrapped in a scarlet head scarf rap the side of Anakin’s helmet with a high laugh. Even under his blue head scarf, helmet, and kohl, he knew Anakin blushed furiously from the spark of his embarrassment in the force, tart as jungan fruit. The woman trilled sharp Huttese and waved Anakin off in clear dismissal.

Anakin mounted his horse with the heavy jangle of his armor and a shake of his head. “The well they water their sheep with at the high pasture is near dried up, we will have to push to Mos Entha for fresh provisions.”

He petted his horse’s mane with an edge of worry. “The men will last; I fear the horses may not.”

Anakin clicked his tongue and urged his own mount up the steep incline of a rising sand dune. “They’ve seen worse, the rounceys are sturdy creatures, and these ones are accustomed to the desert. “The port is only three day’s ride from camp tonight, Ja’lal keeps an eye out for Separatist movements and she swears the troops have moved further south, it should be swift travel.”

“These people do not see you as invader, Anakin. Can you not feel their love in the force?”

He stayed silent so long Obi-Wan assumed himself ignored, until Anakin lifted a gloved fist to rap his knuckles against the Jedi blazon on the breast of his surcoat. “Many of the tribespeople in the dunes know me, they’ve fought the Separatists off their grazing lands enough through the years. Ja’lal is an escaped slave, she trusts me.”

Slave, the word always an aching and tender wound for Anakin. But the Huttese tribes’ people did not trust Anakin on the merit of being a freed slave, even in the far reaches of Tatooine, at the very edge of the Republic people knew the word Je’daii. And Anakin, tall and good and brave, fulfilled the title splendidly well.

“You are a good man, Anakin,” he said as they rode across the sand dunes gilded by the florid and fiery setting sun. “And a good Jedi, when you left—”

Anakin pulled his reigns and drew up his horse on the precipice of the sloping sand drift they had climbed. Before them stretched the grandiose expanse of the golden and wavering desert. Below them in the shadow of the valley, small pricks of red light flickered, the 501st lighting their evening fires before the sun settled behind the horizon.

Astride his horse Anakin gazed out, wrapped in the dark shadows of his keffiyeh and helmet, eyes kohl rimmed and glittering like jewels in the blazing sunset.

“I’m not the man you think I am, master,” Anakin breathed to the wind. “I’ve read your reports from the north, the battles you have won and the lives you’ve saved. I am not the Jedi you are, there is much blood on my hands—innocent blood.”

“Do you think my hands are clean?” He asked around the ache in his throat. At night, the screams of his men from the battlefield haunted him like wraiths, his cursed spirits to remind him of his failings. Travelers in alehouses and markets sang ballads of knights and glory, but they did not know that grown men wept for their mothers when they bled to death in the dirt.

“Sometimes I think—” Anakin tilted his head back, his aventail rustling with the movement. “That this war will last forever until there is no more blood to water the earth. I wonder if it is the will of the force for me to die in the sun and the sand at the end of the world.” He jerked his head forward, seeming to realize what he said aloud. He cast Obi-Wan a guarded expression. “It is not a Jedi way of thinking, to despair so. I know why we fight—I only—”

Obi-Wan nudged his horse forward and laid a hand against Anakin’s arm, leather pressed to linen and steel. “I understand, Anakin. The north is bleak and an endless drift of ice and misery. I often thought I would die alone without ever seeing you again.”

Anakin clasped his own gloved fingers over his and shuddered out a wavering sigh. “And now I am dragging you north again to stand against a dragon.”

“It is our duty as Jedi, we must do what we can to stand against the darkness. Without—without our swords what stands between Ja’lal and the Sith, between slavery and death to the darkside?”

Still clutching his hand Anakin turned to gaze at the burning, blood-streaked sunset. “I would never wish this fight on you, but I am so terribly glad to stand by your side again, master.”

“And I you, Anakin.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Here](http://timetravelkitchen.blogspot.com/2011/03/tarte-of-strawberyes.html) is the strawberry tart recipe I had in mind for Anakin's overeating antics.It's a Tudor recipe and by definition a couple hundred years later then the era of this fic,but from personal experience that recipe is one of my favorite historical ones and I highly recommend.
> 
> You can find my playlist for this chapter [here.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2ah59DcFjA5NKU32ykVTUP?si=34a13d9daf1f4090)
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](https://himboskywalker.tumblr.com/) and I'm always happy to talk shop and answer obscure historical questions.


End file.
